What is Local SEO?
The practice of optimizing a website + Google Business Profile to rank for geographically-tied searches like '[service] near me' or '[service] [city].'
Also known as: local search, local SEO playbook
Local SEO is the discipline of ranking a business in geographically-tied search results — both the regular blue-link SERP and the local 3-pack map that appears for queries with local intent.
Unlike general SEO, local SEO is heavily influenced by signals outside the website itself: your Google Business Profile completeness, citation consistency across directories (NAP), review volume + velocity + recency, and proximity to the searcher. The website is one input to a larger system.
That said, the website is the one input you fully control. Service-area landing pages, local schema markup, on-page mentions of neighborhoods you serve, and pages targeting [service] [city] long-tail keywords are how the site contributes to local-pack rankings.
For a service business, the local 3-pack drives 60-70% of click-throughs from local search. Ranking outside the 3-pack costs you most of the available traffic.